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Sunday, November 2, 2014

It's that time of year again #FliptheScript #AdoptionAwarenessMonth

I am not an orphan (I had two living parents) but I was adopted out to strangers. I lost my name, ancestry, family ties and medical history. All because of the unregulated adoption industry.

It's that time of year when the US adoption industry pulls out all the stops to boost its profits, making November "ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH." They'll tear at your emotions using children they cleverly proclaim to be "orphans!"

Those who read this blog know we call this Adoption BE-wareness Month.

This is our month to make you aware (via blogs and tweets) that all the devious propaganda out there is nothing more than a sales pitch.

When you think of the profits --- billions of dollars each year --- the adoption industry has to keep potential adoptive parents (PAPS) in the mindset of "saving orphans" or they'll lose their income-stream.

What the adoption industry doesn't want is scrutiny!They'd like you to believe there are orphans out there waiting to be adopted!

My job is to keep you educated! This month, all month, we are using the hashtag #flipthescript on Twitter! Join me and use the hashtag and share all the posts about the ongoing adoption industry propaganda! We can change the script - we are adoptees and we have a VOICE!

Latest Gazillion Voices article

Below is a preview of my latest essay just published in the online magazine, Gazillion Voices.I
hope readers will find it useful as a way to think about our
responsibility to fix, if not abolish, the broken adoption system.

Here’s the preview:Another way of putting it is this: There is no
“post-adoption” until we have ended adoption, once and for all. Just as
the boarding school experiment for Native American children has been
discredited as genocidal, just as the Indian Adoption Program has been
disbanded… so too, I anticipate that the transracial and transnational
adoption experiments will be replaced by a much more just and humane
practice that is less about the business of selling children (and in the
process, disrupting extended families of color), and more about
ensuring justice and care for the most needy and vulnerable—namely, poor
women of color and their children around the world…

Child removal: What problem are we solving?

The systematic and widespread removal of Indian children for
placement off the reservations, whether in residential boarding schools
or later, through foster care and adoption by non-Native families, is
shown to be part of a continuum of ongoing strategies to rid settler
nations of their “Indigenous problem.” Interestingly, Canada and
Australia have issued public apologies for their nation’s genocidal
treatment of Indigenous families. The USA has yet to do so.
Much can be learned from the organized resistance, led primarily by
Native American women, which will be of particular interest to activists
working in other struggles facing communities of color. One of the most
inspiring lessons from Jacobs’ book is seeing the ways that
first/birthmothers empowered themselves by blending their roles as
mothers, nurturers, healers, and keepers of the culture with efforts to
become professionals themselves, or by working alongside pro-Indigenous
educators, social workers, and researchers. Not only did they fend off
sexist insults and racist attacks from professionals who degraded Native
women’s ways of knowing and being, they also thwarted assaults from
reform-minded white women whose racist thinking limited their ability to
stand alongside Native women as sister-mothers in solidarity.
Jacobs’s brilliant contribution is towards re-humanizing the victims
and survivors of well-meaning attempts to “rescue” needy children within
a discourse that demonized Native women as unfit, immoral mothers. All
of us touched by adoption would do well to develop a similarly
humanistic view of the first mothers and fathers of adoptees of any
race, and to reject simplistic notions of family dysfunction,
immorality, and parental unfitness when it comes to the family origins
of the adopted individuals we know and love.

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Please: Share your reaction, your thoughts, and your opinions. Be passionate, be unapologetic. Offensive remarks will not be published. We are getting more and more spam. Comments will be monitored. Use the comment form at the bottom of this website which is private and sent direct to Trace.

What our Nations are up against!

To Veronica Brown

Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

TWO WORLDS Book 1 (second edition)

Two Worlds anthology (Vol. 1)

“…sometimes shocking, often an emotional read…this book is for individuals interested in the culture and history of the Native American Indian, but also on the reading lists of universities offering ethnic/culture/Native studies.”

“Well-researched and obviously a subject close to the heart of the authors/compilers, I found the extent of what can only be described as ‘child-snatching’ from the Native Americans quite staggering. It’s not something I was aware of before…”

“The individual pieces are open and honest and give a good insight into the turmoil of dislocation from family and tribe… I think it does have value and a story to tell. I was affected by the stories I read, and amazed by the facts presented…. because it is saying something new, interesting and often astonishing.”

Survivors, write your stories. Write your parents stories. Write the elders stories. Do not be swayed by the colonizers to keep quiet. Tribal Nations have their own way of keeping stories alive.... Trace

Happy Visitors!

READ MORE

Good words

I agree with you on the caring of “orphans” – true orphans, not “paper orphans” as Kathryn Joyce describes in her book, The Child Catchers. The most important thing to remember, however, is that the orphan’s original identity and family connection and heritage must remain intact and available to him or her forever. This business of adoption – and I do mean the multi-billion-dollar, unregulated business of adoption – of wiping out the child’s original identity, falsifying birth records with the adopters’ names, altering facts such as place of birth, severing familial kinship, must stop … Immediately. And the outrageous injustices foisted upon adoptees and their families for the past 100 years must be addressed and righted. We are faced today with six to seven million people who were basically legally kidnapped, sold to the highest bidder, their identities falsified, and placed in a lifelong, imposed witness protection program for which there is no legal recourse. Then told by church officials, agency and government functionaries that they have no right to know who they are, to do genealogy or learn about important family medical history, or know the identity of or associate with blood relatives. This is how the Judeo-Christian society has interpreted “caring for orphans”, for it’s own selfish interests and greed. Starting with Georgia Tann, the woman charged with kidnapping and selling 5,000 children, most of whom were given to the rich and powerful who then colluded with her to “seal” adoptions and cover their nefarious activities (see, for example, Gov. Herbert Lehman, NY, 1935).

Every. Day.

adoptees take back adoption narrative and reject propaganda

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines

click to read and listen about Trace, Diane, Julie and Suzie

Canada's Residential Schools

The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.

WANTED!

If you are a genealogist and know about DNA tests, tribal records and have access to the census: WE NEED YOU.

Use the contact form at the bottom of this blog asap.

We lost our search angel

Karen Vigneault (1958-2019)

https://www.c-span.org/video/?326149-1/a-generation-removed

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ADOPTION TRUTH

As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.” The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.

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Original Birth Certificate Map in the USA

Navajo Times article 2014

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